In which I pretend to be a PM for an app called Sidekick, a live application debugger. I talk to Nived, a software engineer with experience debugging and doing root cause analysis, but, as it turns out, in a different layer of the stack than Sidekick is intended for!
As a PM my objective is to help build products that are applicable for increasingly high-frequency jobs so it can acquire newer users at lower cost and retain existing ones at higher value.
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To understand jobs, I'm trying to understand how often the user faces a trigger to use the app. Is there a higher frequency behavior upstream it can be relevant for. Eg: Whatsapp taking a bite from Shopify because buyers have already interacted with the store multiple times by chat and can just buy there.
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To understand acquisition, I'm trying to understand barriers to try and switch.
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To understand retention, I'm trying to understand how quickly s/he's deriving value.
But on this call, I learned something I wasn't expecting, which is a sign of a good call. If you learn exactly what you're expecting, something might be wrong.
Nived won't be a user of Sidekick, which is used to debug cloud applications higher up the stack while Nived works closer to hardware and OS at the "low level" of the stack.
Good customer segmentation through a call like this saves hours of endless naval gazing. It helps position customers vs non-customers. It also helps to decide what not to build. In this case Sidekick probably doesn't want to build a C, C++ equivalent of their app because this audience is not winnable.
Big thanks to Nived for the call. Also a clarification that he is not a Tesla employee even though he references them. The information of OTA updates is public knowledge :)
